Let’s imagine there is someone out there who watched last week’s WWDC keynote and thought to themselves, “This is it! Now! Now is the time for me to learn to program and build an iOS app!”

Nevermind that they are about 6 years late to gold rush, it’s an exciting proposition. Programming is fun! I come from a family of builders. The only difference between my father and grandfathers is they built homes with hammers. I sit in front of a keyboard all day typing and looking at cat GIFs.

I digress. You want to learn to be an iOS developer. What are you supposed to do? Aaron Hillegass (whose books I credit with teaching me this stuff way back when he was the only person writing about Cocoa development) says you should learn Objective-C. Ash Furrow and a few others say you should learn Swift because Objective-C is too hard.

Guess what? It doesn’t matter what language you want to learn.

If you want to be an iOS developer you realistically have four options:

Objective-C: old faithful.

Swift: New hotness.

Xamarin: The crazy kids in the corner who want to use C#.

RubyMotion: Know Ruby? Tired of arguing with DHH about whether tests are dead? You too can build an iOS app.

I’d lean towards choosing one of the first two options because they are first-party solutions provided directly by Apple, but the language you choose to learn matters little compared to learning the frameworks. The Cocoa Touch frameworks have always been the secret sauce. Whether you’re using Objective-C, Swift, C#, or Ruby you’re still going to have to learn how to use a UIButton and a UITableView.

Will you be more of an iOS developer because you took the time to learn Objective-C and it’s 20+ years of history versus Swift and its eleven days? Nope. Your customers care about what’s on the surface of your app: does it look, interact, and feel like an iOS app. If you can do that, the language doesn’t matter.

There is no right answer to this question. Choose what the language that speaks to you and then go build something awesome.